Traversal
It's late, so I'll be brief.

I need to traverse my way down the constraint tree of a where clause. This is an issue because none of the nodes are named. So the only way to travel down is with a set of conjunctions in the iTQL query. Unfortunately, every level down in the tree means a new conjunction, and the tree is arbitrarily deep. So how do I go down?

There are a few solutions.

The first is to name everything. That would work, but should not be necessary, and would be a pain to use. Besides, an unnamed node should not cause it to all stop working.

Another solution is to use JRDF and traverse my way down manually. This is undesirable as I'm already using iTQL heavily. It also runs into a problem of re-using blank nodes from one query to the next. That should be OK, but strictly speaking is not allowed.

An alternative is to automatically generate iTQL to traverse its way down the tree. This would work, but would also lead to messy results with a lot of work to interpret. It would get even harder if different branches on the tree were different depths.

Thinking about the shape of the tree made me realise that the form of the queries is always in conjunctive normal form. I could take advantage of this, but it will lead to a very inflexible system in future... and I may need some flexibility when OWL gets fully implemented. However, it's always a fallback position.

My final option is to use blank nodes from a previous query as constraint elements for a new query. This should work, particularly as I'm on the server, and if I stick to a single transaction. The problem here is that I need to abandon iTQL and build the queries by hand. Fortunately, this isn't too hard, and need only be done for this part of the rule parser. I also intend to use iTQL to pre-query the simple constraints, and hold references to them for use as I get to the leaves of the constraint expression tree.

ItqlInterpreter
I had an attempt at a spike with some client side code, to see if I could build queries which were constrained on a blank node. Unfortunately, the query to retrieve the blank node kept failing on me. After trying all sorts of variations I tried selecting everything from the model. This worked. So then I constrained on a single column, and sure enough, nothing worked.

After lots of permutations I've discovered that ItqlInterpreter can execute a query easily and correctly. However, the combination of ItqlInterpreter.buildQuery, ItqlInterpreter.getSession() and Session.query() always fails. I was unable to work out why (not in the time I had, anyway). It must work for me on the server side because my session is pre-defined for me.

So I can't test my idea of querying on a blank node. I'll just have to do lots of logging at the server.